The Results are In… for the 2016 Calico User Survey

Thank you to all that completed the recent Project Calico user survey. We found the results to be illuminating – and hope you will too!

But before we dive into them, I wanted to introduce myself to the community. I joined the Project Calico team about a month ago as the Director of Customer of Success at Tigera. In those weeks I’ve had the opportunity chat with many users as well as meet quite a number at our KubeCon booth in Seattle. I greatly enjoyed hearing about their use cases, how the project has been valuable and where improvements can be gained.

The survey itself was an immense source of interest to the team and to me. While we keep a watchful eye on github pulls and Slack memberships, those numbers do not have the same insights as the survey. Following is a summary of the key take aways:

20% of users responding were now in production, with additional 64% testing for production

Kubernetes is of very strong interest. A full 75% of of respondents are using, or intend to use, Calico with Kubernetes.

The top 5 most important factors for a virtual networking solution, according to Calico community, are:

Reliability/Simplicity

Data Plane Performance

Ease of Troubleshooting

Scalability / control plane performance

Microsegmentation / fine grained security policies

Calico did rank well in each of these areas which is great to hear (and matches many of our priorities).

The survey also included lots of individual use cases and feature requests. Rest assured those are closely reviewed by the management team. Two points that I want to briefly mention here: (1) Calico does currently support IPV6 (yeah!) – although not all the orchestrators we work with (most notably Kubernetes) do not fully do so, yet; and (2) We recognize that documentation has been an issue. In fact, we have already made significant improvements (at docs.projectcalico.org) since the survey, and will continue to make improvements.

I hope that you find this information helpful. In my role as head of Customer Success, it’s my job to make sure that all users are getting as much value as possible from Project Calico. Please do not hesitate to email me (tb at projectcalico dot org) so that we can discuss your needs in more detail.

About Tom Blossom

I'm the Director of Customer Success at Tigera. Prior to Tigera, I built and led customer success and technical support teams at Apteligent/Crittercism and GoGrid. I enjoy spending time with family, hiking, imagining finally starting my goth rock band ("Black Blossom") as well as making and consuming moscow mules and pimms cups.